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Top 10 Science Fiction Predictions That Came Terrifyingly True
George Orwell's telescreens in Nineteen Eighty-Four now read as a rough sketch of China's Social Credit System, which draws on roughly 700 million CCTV cameras and AI facial recognition. Arthur C. Clarke described a tablet-like newspad in 2001: A Space Odyssey 42 years before the iPad arrived, and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 imagined Seashell Radio earbuds decades before AirPods reached 300 million wearers. This list tracks ten such predictions, from Gibson's cyberspace to Asimov's self-driving cars, that moved from fiction into fact.
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Frequently Asked Questions About Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True
### Are sci-fi predictions usually accurate? Most are speculative, but a small number land remarkably close to real technology or social trends decades later.
### Which sci-fi author made the most accurate predictions? Readers most often cite Arthur C. Clarke for communications satellites and tablets, and George Orwell for surveillance technology.
### Why do sci-fi predictions sometimes come true? Because authors extrapolate from current scientific and social trends, so the most grounded forecasts tend to age well.
### What was the earliest sci-fi prediction on this list? Hugo Gernsback's 1911 description of video calling is the earliest item featured here.
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